Top Gun Fact vs. Fiction: Did Tom Cruise Really Fly?

Top Gun: Maverick put real actors in real fighter jets pulling real Gs. But how much of what you see on screen is fact, and how much is Hollywood? As pilots who fly aerobatic stunt planes every week, we can tell you exactly where the movie sticks to reality and where it bends it.

The school is real. The story is not. Both movies are built around the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School, known as TOPGUN, founded in 1969 at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego. Since 1996 the real program has operated out of Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada, which means today's actual Top Gun pilots train in the same state where you can fly with us.

Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Rooster, Iceman and the plot are fictional. The flying culture, the callsigns and the intensity of the training are drawn from the real thing.

Yes, with one important exception. Cruise has held a pilot's license since 1994 and is a serious aviator. In the movie he flew for real, including the P-51 Mustang in the final scenes, a warbird he personally owns, and the helicopter sequences.

What he could not do is fly the F/A-18. U.S. Department of Defense rules prohibit civilians from operating military fighter jets, no matter how famous they are. In every Super Hornet shot, a Navy pilot flew the aircraft from the front seat while the actor rode in the back, on camera and pulling the same Gs.

Almost everything airborne in Maverick is real. The production rented F/A-18 Super Hornets from the Navy at a reported $11,374 per hour and mounted custom camera rigs inside the cockpits. The actors framed their own shots and operated their own cameras in flight, because no camera crew could ride along.

That is also why you see far more F/A-18s than F-35s in the film. The F-35 only has one seat, so there was no way to put an actor in it.

Riding backseat in a Super Hornet is brutal if your body is not ready for it. Cruise designed a three-month training program that took his co-stars up the aircraft ladder step by step:

When the movie was released, USA TODAY sent a reporter up in the Extra 330 to experience the cast's training for himself. That flight happened with us at Sky Combat Ace. He called the Extra 330 the world's most advanced aerobatic stunt plane, flew the same aircraft Glen Powell trained in, went head-to-head in a real dogfight, and was proud to report he kept his lunch. Powell, by his own admission, did not always manage that part in training.

Powell knows our hangar too. He stopped by Sky Combat Ace for an interview in front of our stunt planes when Maverick came out. You can watch it on our Top Gun Experience page.

The Extra 330: the plane the Maverick cast trained in, and the plane you fly at Sky Combat Ace.

Here is the part we love: the Extra 330 is exactly what we fly at Sky Combat Ace in Las Vegas. Same aircraft, same maneuvers, same Gs. The difference is that in our plane, you take the controls.

They flew in them, not as pilots. Navy aviators flew every F/A-18 sequence from the front seat while the actors rode in back. The actors did real training flights in the Cessna 172, Extra 330 and L-39 during their three-month program.

Yes. The 1986 film used real F-14 Tomcats and real Navy pilots, which is a big reason it still holds up.

Training in the Extra 330 took them to as much as 8 Gs, which is more than astronauts feel at launch. That G tolerance is what made the F/A-18 filming possible.

Yes, but it is not as fun as it sounds. You cannot touch a current U.S. military jet, and rides in retired jets like the L-39 or MiG-29 run $5,000 to $10,000+, come with medical checks and red tape, and leave you as a passenger for most of the flight. We wrote up the full reality check in Wanna Fly a Fighter Jet? Read This First. Short version: in the Extra 330 you actually fly the maneuvers yourself, the same plane the Maverick cast trained in.